


love me by the night

by powerandpathos



Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood, M/M, Masquerade Ball, Werewolves, Witches, fae, handjob, request, there’s a lot going on in one room okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 16:21:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15440958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: He Tian caught his scent the night before the ball, and then he was ruined.—A 19 Days Vampire/Masquerade AU requested by keatsthebrightstar on Tumblr.





	love me by the night

_Gold on the tongue, he’s euphoria. My mouth is drinking at his unprotected neck and my hands are between his unguarded thighs and there’s heat soaking me and I can’t finish him or he will be finished. There will be no more—no apple-sweet blood, no shuddering climax, no hoarse, scratchy panting along the slope of my neck—and I need more._  
  


* * *

Last night’s memory wound tightly with the present, a twisting vine blooming in the light of the ballroom as I slipped past the herald, and saw him in a way that was more than seeing. It wasn’t the braid of red hair at his nape that gave him away beneath the fox mask—it was his scent.

In the light, he was a well-proportioned man in his twenties, a wiry cord of muscle under pale skin, robed and ruffled in a cream-coloured jacket that made his hair and freckles flame, the collar laced high around his neck, and I savoured the memory of blood in the back of my throat, summer-night sweet.

I knew this craving; I’d heard of it a thousand times for a thousand nights, seen its trace in others. I knew that swaying an inch in my restraint would massacre him on the ballroom floor in a reflective pool of red. I knew that most of me wouldn’t mind. The He family was rule-bound and unyielding—and old. But it was arrogant, and belligerent, and a dead human would be an unseen spec on our soaked history.

I snatched the nearest glass from a passing waiter, raising it in my father’s unseeing direction as he placated nobles and members of the Council. Warm and bland, it pushed sluggishly down my throat.

My attention was weighted as it tugged away from the man standing at the opposite edge of the room, talking with Jian Yi. The image of him roaming the halls of the castle last night was crystalised in my brain: how I’d pressed him to the cold stone, how eventually he’d let me. How I was trembling not to do the same to Jian Yi now, harder and with punishment, for being in his vicinity.

My brother found me first, as Jian Yi lifted a set of pellucid eyes to where I stood, and grinned. I put the empty glass on a tray before the stem snapped, the glass coated in sticky red residue. My brother eyed the abrupt movement, and came close to my ear.

‘Take this as a warning, Brother,’ He Cheng murmured over the stringed hum of the orchestra. ‘If you kill the human in your arrogance, Father will consider doing the same to you.’

I rolled my eyes; I’d done worse than kill a human before a ballroom full of guests, and He Cheng could match it twice-over.

‘Getting sentimental in your old age?’ I asked him.

He didn’t bait, but then—he never had. His mouth was a hard line, his eyes dark and impossible as the guidance of a starless night. ‘Their family is harmless but dangerous,’ he told me. ‘They’re here as a show of thanks, of _charité_. The boy’s mother nursed Father back to health when no other human could.’

‘I don’t need a family history,’ I muttered. I wanted another glass, something to take the edge off—enough to gorge on if the company hadn’t been so prim. ‘I won’t touch him.’

He Cheng surveyed me. ‘I know that look,’ he decided. ‘I know what you’re like when you want something.’

‘Were we not trained to take what we want?’ I countered, turning to face him fully. We were a sight among our guests, draped in black frills, pale skin shrouded in darkness—striking by our own right, formidable as a pair. ‘Isn’t that strength?’

He Cheng stared me down. ‘Strength is knowing when to resist. Even with the bloodsong.’

Bloodsong. _Chant du sang._ That thing that called to us all, eventually. Tested us all. I chewed on my own tongue, felt the grind of iron-strong teeth and protruding incisors that would have cut a human’s tongue to ribbons. My mouth had been swelling with bitter saliva since I’d walked through the gilded arch of the ballroom, the man’s scent soaking in my skin like the chandelier light that refracted off a thousand gold-edged mirrors along the walls.

For the first night in many, I felt warm in my clothes.

‘Do they know about us?’ I asked He Cheng.

‘Only his mother. And we’re not to touch them. Our race is in their hands. She could tell the whole town.’

I considered this. ‘Why didn’t Father kill her?’

He Cheng followed my gaze where, still, Jian Yi entertained him. Jian Yi’s white peacock mask sat atop his cheekbones, silvery eyes smiling, the sharp tips of his ears hidden beneath loose strands of straight blond hair, curtained to his back. The redhead stared back at the fae, arms folded, mouth twisted in displeasure. The blood in my veins was singing bitter, and I swallowed the aftertaste on my tongue.

My question unanswered, I looked back to my brother. He was staring straight at me; the corners of his mouth had fallen down bleakly.

‘You already have, haven’t you?’ he said. It was not a question.

My non-reply was enough. I wasn’t in the habit of lying when I could rejoice in my transgressions. This, for some reason, didn’t feel like something to revel in. I wanted to covet the feeding, gather the knowledge of it close to my chest like a bouquet of dying flowers and bury it in a coffin. Jian Yi’s hand rested briefly on the man’s shoulder, and I thought, briefly, about shredding his neck to stringed flesh.

He Cheng looked like he wanted to grimace; he looked like he wanted to throttle me, as he had done before. A He fight would have been entertaining for the evening, but I was hoping not to ruin my jacket, and Father would mourn the fissured marble floor from unbreakable bodies thrown against breakable stone.

‘Don’t tell Father,’ I said.

‘This is your problem. Don’t bring shame on this family, He Tian. Not again.’

_Not again._

The words forced my gaze away. ‘Don’t tell Father,’ I repeated, low.

He Cheng leaned close. ‘Fix this,’ he murmured, ‘and I won’t have to.’

 

* * *

  
‘ _The fuck are you doing to me?’ he murmurs, lips struggling to part or press together as my mouth trails his jugular, feels the desperate flutter of his pulse. Fear, hummingbird swift, and an electric pleasure that is tinged of the blood beading down his throat. I swipe it before it reaches his nightshirt, the tracking of saliva sticky and sharp-sweet._

_My own breath comes thick from still, hollow lungs. His scent is maddening. My fingers bite into the wall, grey mortar blooming in clouds of dust as his own teeth trail my throat._

_‘I’m giving you a gift,’ I whisper._

 

* * *

  
He Cheng left me standing there, and the next glass that slid down my throat was lukewarm and twisted my face into a sour grimace. A self-made war tormented inside of me; the longer the man’s scent mingled through the room, warping between the sway of bodies dancing to the orchestra, dresses and petticoats and coattails a whirl of lace and satin that did nothing but carry him towards me, the more I hungered.

In me, there was a drought.

A flash of cool blue distracted me, and I caught Zhan Zhengxi on the arm as he passed me obliviously, his energy concentrated elsewhere.

‘What the…’ Recognition dawned. Zhengxi sniffed, frowned. ‘He Tian,’ he said flatly. I released his arm. His mask was an array of sculpted fur, golds and browns that fanned around his face, a blue-eyed wolf staring back at me. It was almost uncomfortably real.

‘Funny,’ I remarked, leaning back on my heels. ‘Does your sister know you’re wearing that?’

Zhengxi snorted. ‘She made it,’ he told me. ‘As an _homage_ in her absent honour.’ Beneath his mask, I knew he had an eyebrow raised in placid accusation. ‘Throwing a ball on a full moon was a nice touch. She’s howled at me all week for not being able to attend.’

I blinked rapidly, eyelashes fluttering against the eye sockets of my mask. ‘A full moon? Tonight?’ A low whistle passed my lips. ‘You know my father never pays enough attention to the lunar cycles. Poor pup. Hadn’t she made a dress?’

Zhengxi’s gaze shifted away, reactions subdued as always, his abilities rendering him quiet and watchful—so many energies to read, signatures to make sense of. A ball, for someone like him, was a night-long headache. ‘What do you want, He Tian?’

‘ _Want?’_ I echoed, marked with offence. But I wasn’t in the mood for games; I let the ruse drop quickly, stepped forward. ‘ _Introduce me, Zhengxi,’_ I ordered, voice dark as pitch.

Zhengxi looked at me. ‘To whom?’

I looked back. ‘The human Jian Yi hasn’t stopped pestering all night.’

Zhengxi’s gaze didn’t seek out the human in question; he’d already been watching Jian Yi as closely as I had. ‘Since when do you need someone to act as a medium?’ Zhengxi wrinkled his nose, mouth twisting. ‘You know, I can smell your vile bloodsong from across the room.’

‘Then close yourself off,’ I snapped, unsympathetic. ‘It’s not something I can control.’

‘Believe me, I’ve been trying,’ Zhengxi muttered. ‘It smells like rotten fruit.’ He paused, looked at me more closely. ‘I assume there’s a reason he carries the scent, too.’

I smiled thinly. ‘I haven’t broken any rules.’

‘Right,’ Zhengxi said blandly. He sighed, turned on his heel. Wry disbelief coloured his voice: ‘Follow me. I’ll _introduce_ you.’

 

* * *

  
_‘This is a dream,’ I tell him, stroking him still, my palm sticky with his cum. ‘A sweet, sweet dream.’_

_He whimpers, growls as my hand tightens, falls loose against me as I press his back closer to the wall, his head slumped on my shoulder. I pull my hand from the drawstring of his night clothes and taste the salty residue drying on my palm. It’s headier than his blood, carries a different kind of life, but I still swallow it, gladly, whole._

_I think of laying him bare-skinned on my sheets, a mess of cream skin and red flush, a portrait of cum and blood staining the bed, nursing him until he’s dry. The temptation lingers; something inside of me is shrieking to relinquish the restraint, ruin him there on the flagstone floor until he drains through the cracks of the stone—but even in the darkness of the hallway, his eyes look at me like fire._

_‘Go back to bed and don’t leave your room again,’ I tell him, leaving a kiss that is quick and wreckingly longing at once, knowing the command will break through his stupor. ‘Dream of me.’_

 

* * *

  
I would recall the steps I made across the ballroom only later, would remember how Jian Yi had flitted away before my approach, Zhengxi’s brief introduction and departure _—before Jian Yi makes a fool of himself—_ like the liquid recollection of a dream from which I had woken up some time ago.

Up close, in the light, he was formidable. This close, I could taste him like I was drinking him. I could hear my own blood in him, like pressing an ear to the ground and hearing the flow of water, hiking through wilderness, parched, and catching the sound of a river through a thicket of trees. The thought that any part of me was in him blurred my senses. I felt like a green, mouth glistening with fluid, gums aching where my teeth had ripped themselves through bruised flesh only barely regrown in a night’s sleep.

I should have been angry at my own weakness, reviled him for reducing me to a greedy child with only a chemical, but I knew I was greedy, and I knew my hunger, and I knew I’d have it.

I wasn’t starved—Lilith only knew we weren’t short of an artery in the castle, but Guan Shan smelled of coconut perfume on warm skin and the ash of fire-flicked logs on a night-darkened beach, and he smelled of the sea. He made me think of darkened coves and ice-blue pools, sunlight glimpsing in; damp, rough rock under my hands like pumice stone. It made me think of pressing Mo Guan Shan against it as I had last night against the castle walls.

_Mo Guan Shan._

I breathed his name in, exhaled it emptily, felt my still heart raging with the need to beat. Desperation hung on the part of his pink lips, his amber eyes, rust-red and flaring at the sight of me, some nightmare manifesting before him, as he bowed.

‘Would you honour me with a dance?’ I would remember asking later, knowing it said, imperative, _Dance with me; I’ve been breathing you in since you passed the threshold._

He acquiesced, reluctant and torn.

There was something in his veins by this point, the tug of a magnet like a pole star, our bodies north and south and meeting in the middle. He wouldn’t know me like I could feel him—his humanity was a dull sensor to a thousand things, including the bloodsong—but he would feel enough. A needle-prick of fear, a flush of want. Maybe, he didn’t know me at all, wouldn’t remember me from a darkened shadow in the corner of a blood-drunk memory, but his body would.

I felt the human warmth of his palm in my own as the dance began, saw the veil of disgust at my tomb-like coldness, and regret twinged achingly inside of me. It was an abuse the Council had been debating for centuries. I was a poison to him, a drug like crushed poppies in his bloodstream; had the consent been of my own creation, or his own volition? Where did my desire end and his revulsion begin?

I didn’t regret the taste of him; I didn’t regret the puncture marks he would have hidden behind a high collar in a daze before the ball. I regretted that I couldn’t have kissed him with teeth and hands alone, that his blood wouldn’t have filled my mouth, sharp and coppery on muted senses, from only the frantic gestures of an overzealous lover. Fed on his pleasure, not his blood. Matched him in ardour. Been human.

 _We could match,_ I told myself forcibly. _But that possibility only exists in one realm._ And then the glee, dark and full as kiss-swollen lips, reared its head.

We danced. For a human, Guan Shan wasn’t graceless. Hesitation cloaked his movements, a halting, stilting jerk, but it was nerves, not clumsiness, and sharp as a needle-made haystack, driven by an imitation of what I had oozing through my own skin. I thought about the blood sloshing in my belly last night, the hot slide of it down my throat, red snaking through me like a network of veins on the back of a leaf the way molten gold filled a smith’s mould.

‘Your mother cared for my father,’ I told him, mid-way through a minuet.

At my words, his feet stumbled, and his grip tightened around my own. I relished it. ‘Your family’s been so fuckin’ generous in repaying her,’ he muttered.

His voice was rough, like it had been blurred by smoke, and I hinged on his words, remembered the pleas that had slipped out last night. The lace cuff of his jacket brushed my skin, and I thought of the soft strands of his hair, of fingernails cutting white lines into my back, of the ways he could touch me and not touch me.

Thightly, I said, ‘You seem to resent that.’

Guan Shan’s lips were a thin press, eyes shifty. ‘She’s been weird since she came here. I feel… weird being here.’

‘The castle’s old,’ I told him. With a smirk, ‘People say it’s haunted.’

‘Yeah? How many bodies have you got under the floorboards?’

My lips pulled back over my teeth—not too far, but enough. Thinking of boarded coffins in the dampness of the cellar, I said, ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ which sounded like _too many._ With a wink: ‘Just don’t go wandering about at night.’

Guan Shan jerked his chin, an endearing jolt made of defiance. ‘I’m not afraid of fucking _shadows_.’

‘It’s what’s _in_ them you should be afraid of,’ I told him, more softly than I’d intended. ‘They might bite.’

Guan Shan remained silent until the orchestra closed the dance, and when he loosened his hand, his fingers pressed at his neck, wincing. I tracked the movement, remembering what it felt like to seal my lips over the warm skin, to hear the whimper with the pop of a sharp puncture.

‘And… what happens if they do?’ Guan Shan asked.

Guilt panged, but not enough for me to stop picturing it: that head of red flame in my line of vision, for an eternity. That pale skin within reach for an endless lifetime. Rationality had abandoned me; the ache of broken gums was nothing compared to the strange whorling in my chest, bloodsong dense enough to make me feel, for a moment, like I was alive.

From nowhere, I thought, _He’s more than blood. He’s life._

‘Then you wait,’ I told Guan Shan. ‘Anything could happen.’

‘ _Anything like what?’_ Guan Shan gritted out. I felt his anger in my blood, wondered if this was what Zhengxi felt in people so intently. It was maddening and bacchic, and I wanted to twist it around my finger like a lock of hair. Poke at the embers until they flared. My body hadn’t felt real warmth in so long.

His voice said, _Cut me and watch me bleed. I won’t be the first to look away._

‘Like nothing,’ I said. ‘Or like everything. Everything could change. You might change.’

Guan Shan halted, yanked his arm from my grip. The loss of touch was agonising; and it shocked me, how I wanted to gather him to me until my skin was on his skin and my flesh was in his, his in mine. I’d rip his chest open and crawl into the space between his ribs if it meant I could be close, hold his throbbing heart in my hands and eat the spurting mess of muscle whole.

But I wanted him whole, and I wanted his warmth to last. I wanted him in a way that had nothing to do with lust, even less to do with blood, and everything to do with ending a perpetual solitude—a horizon I already blended into well. And if inside him—painting his walls with an empty climax, groaning and tightening and trembling—was the happy medium, who was I to object?

‘What _are_ you?’ he whispered. Not who. The question turned heads, caught the ears of vampires and wolves, witches and fae who had the sound around them amplified. In a voice meant only for me, he asked, ‘What are you doing to me?’

But I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t break our covenant, not for a human creature.

I sniffed, noted the wetness of Guan Shan’s lips, heard the gush of blood pumping frantically through his veins, erratic and eccentric, and in the two nights I’d known Guan Shan, I now knew.

Soon, I’d have the authority to give Guan Shan his answers.

Soon, _Vampire,_ I’d be able to say. _You’re like me. You’re mine._

**Author's Note:**

> [Find me on Tumblr.](%E2%80%9Cagapaic.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D)
> 
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> 
> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or reblogging the signal boost for this fic on Tumblr!


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